Not long ago I discovered by accident that there were 2007.0 stage files available for the s390/s390x architecture. As a venerable Big Iron hacker who uses Gentoo at home, I was intrigued by this and set about to install the s390x stage3 release onto Hercules, using CentOS 4.6 to do the bootstrap. I have had considerable success, with a lot of help from the Linux-390 list, but there are some areas that still need addressing. So I was wondering what the current status of the architecture is; there are no 2008.0 stage files but packages to periodically get updated. Does some one still maintain the arch? I found a document http://dev.gentoo.org/~vapier/s390/ that was last updated on 2004!

I have made various fixes to the distro:

Fixed the console support so you get a login shell

Written a /etc/conf.d/net that works with the latest kernels

Enabled 3270 console support

Hacked up an install method using the CentOS installer

There are a number of bugs that don't appear in the RHEL/SLES distros, in particular, RealVNC segfaults and xorg-x11 does not compile. Anybody know anything about this?

TIA_________________"Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst"
from "Mandalay" by Rudyard Kipling

Its maintained only by vapier(vapier@g.o), and i don't know any gentoo dev that has access to that kind of box, the binpkgs are done automatically.

Any help is welcome

All you need is Hercules and a reasonably powerful Intel box (I have a Core2Duo E6400 with 2GB of DDR2 RAM running amd64 Gentoo and can get 80+ MIPS with Hercules). I am happy to help out but don't know how to fix any of the problems I have encountered, otherwise I would already have done so.
One easy thing to fix might be the absence of compatibility libraries so you can run s390 binaries on a s390x system (the enterprise distros have this). This would allow running software only available as 32 bit binary rpms; the ned editor springs to mind._________________"Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst"
from "Mandalay" by Rudyard Kipling

Oh, you're using an emulator...
I'm not sure bugs using an emulator are welcome...i have no clue.

You obviously don't know Hercules, it can run z/OS perfectly and there are large numbers of mainframe sysprogs using it who are very quick to report any deviations from the hardware standard. How do you think the s390 versions of CentOS are developed._________________"Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst"
from "Mandalay" by Rudyard Kipling

I am still here!_________________"Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst"
from "Mandalay" by Rudyard Kipling

fine, thanks for the reply.
so the situation is as follows:
i installed centos 4.7 as described in their documentation, on DASD 0120,0121, these are 3390-3.
centos used both disks.
after successful install i created DASD 0122, a 3390-9, formated it ext2, chrooted and unpacked a s390x-stage inside.
after emerge --sync i installed gentoo-sources-2.6.27-r10. the config was okay, according to vapier's old doc, i only changed all the modules to built-in.
complete config: here
after building the kernel configured ZIPL.

Also you should be careful what disks you have defined. The kernel allocates the partitions sequentially, so if you have 0120, 0121, 0122 attached, unit 0122 will be /dev/dasdc._________________"Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst"
from "Mandalay" by Rudyard Kipling

hey... how far off is system/370 from 390?
is there any linux that will run upon 370?

At its simplest, s370 was 32 bit and s390 is 64 bit but there are vast online resources that will explain it all. I suggest the linux-390 list to find out about retrofitting Linux to s370._________________"Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst"
from "Mandalay" by Rudyard Kipling

hey... how far off is system/370 from 390?
is there any linux that will run upon 370?

At its simplest, s370 was 32 bit and s390 is 64 bit but there are vast online resources that will explain it all. I suggest the linux-390 list to find out about retrofitting Linux to s370.

wasn't it actually 31 bit?

according to my problem... i came to the following thought:
if the parameters line is wrong for some reason, especially the "root=" parameter, the kernel _would_ actually start, but then would be unable to mount the root filesystem and panic.
but this isn't the case here. the kernel does not start at all.
binro, do you have any other ideas? i ran out of...

The zipl command writes to the disk ("boot sector" on PCs) and if that is wrong you don't get to first base. So this is the place to check. Th old Vapier doco you refer to is very out of date. Also the guys on the Hercules list are a mine of information. That's where I go._________________"Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst"
from "Mandalay" by Rudyard Kipling

the hercules website seems to be down. at least i can't reach it.
do you have a link to the mailing list web interface?

i tinkered with the zipl.conf of the centos installation and added an additional entry, gentoo, and copies the compiled gentoo kernel to the centos /boot.
i cannot get it to boot from this zipl.conf either. the result is similar to that of the gentoo zipl.
zipl writes the "boot sector", i am aware of this. but what can i have done wrong to not even let it show up?

The Hercules community is based around a Yahoo group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hercules-390/
where you can browse the archives._________________"Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst"
from "Mandalay" by Rudyard Kipling